Description
A woman stands at the edge of a cliff, looking out to sea and the horizon. Dancers welcome the sun in a circle of stones. A dowsing road turns without warning. A church bell. Footsteps. Old Weird Albion is America writer Justin Hopper's dark love song to the English South; a poetic essay interrogating the high, haunted landscape of the South Downs Way; the memories, myths and forgotten histories from Winchester to Beachy Head. When someone disappears, when someone leaps from a cliff and is all-but-erased from memory, what traces might we find in the crumbling chalk of the cliff face; in the wind that buffets the edge of this Albion? A skewed alternative to Bill Bryson, Hopper casts himself as the outsider as he wanders the English countryside in pursuit of mystical encounters. His journey sees him joining New Age eccentrics and accidental visionaries on the hunt for crop circles and druidic stones, discussing the power of nature with ecotherapists and pagans, tracing the ruins of abandoned settlements and walking the streets of eerie suburbs. Through a startling revelation of his own family history, Hopper turns part detective, part memoirist, tracking the footsteps of his grandfather's first wife, Doris; piecing together her forgotten history.
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RIGHTS HELD: World
Endorsements
The Old Weird Albion is beautifully well-written and easily read; the stories come quickly and suggestively and the descriptions of the various locales and journeys through them are fresh, vivid and engaging ... This book is warmest when its bells ring without explanation, when the Goddess mutters a banality in a dream, when ghosts flash in the corner of vision and then flee.
Phil Smith, Mythogeography
The Old Weird Albion achieves something important - it changes the way we can look at the landscape ... part travelogue, part 'psychogeography', at times haunting, at times poetic.
The Hampshire Chronicle
Beautiful and compelling writing ... more personal and sensitive than most psycho-geography manages to be.
Layla Legard
I cannot recommend warmly enough Justin Hopper's new book The Old Weird Albion which I have just devoured at a single sitting. Anyone who knows or has walked any of the Sussex Downs will adore this book. Lyrical, mystical and deeply connected.
Tom Flynn @artnose
Author Biography
Justin Hopper is a writer of landscape, memory and myth. His journalism, poetry, audio projects and curated exhibitions have appeared in both his native USA and adopted UK home. He lives in Constable Country with his partner and their son.
Penned in the Margins
Penned in the Margins creates award-winning publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks. From modest beginnings as a reading series in a converted railway arch in south London, Penned in the Margins has grown over the last 15 years into an award-winning independent publisher of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and cross genre work. "A marvellously exciting venture, bringing together the worlds of experimentalism and performance, always looking for new ways to present the spoken and written word in a time of artistic flux. The mainstream will, in the future, be redefined and enriched by companies like Penned in the Margins." Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publication Date November 2017
- ISBN/Identifier 9781908058379
- Primary Price 9.99 GBP
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
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